Tag: web
Snakes on the Web September 4th, 2009
A talk given at PyCon Argentina and PyCon Brazil, 2009. Web development sucks. It’s true: web development, at its worst, is difficult, repetitive, and boring. The tools we have suck. At best, they make web development slightly less painful, but we’re a long way from making web development awesome. The history of web development tools is a history of trying to solve this problem. It’s a history of asking, “how can we make this suck less?…
Descriptivists and Prescriptivists January 13th, 2009
In the world of grammarians there are two competing camps: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California sums up the difference: Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like – what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?” By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask “What should English be like – what forms should people use and what functions should they serve?…
Of the Web October 19th, 2007
I’ll have more notes about CouchDB later tonight. First, though, I want to step back and look at the big picture. A few months ago, Bill de hÓra wrote that “a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web” (as opposed to old-school tools that try to pretend the Web doesn’t exist – I’m looking at you, ASP). It doesn’t sound like much, but to me this is the best possible compliment Django could be given.…